ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the literature of John Dominis Holt and Brandy Nalani McDougall, takes the use of Pidgin in their work to think through Native Hawaiian resistance to United States settler-colonial categorizations of indigeneity. It aims to reclaim Pidgin for Indigenous authors as an act of resistance and revival to settler-colonial assimilation. The chapter provides new archives and sites for analysis, particularly regarding the question of language, literary expression, and the place of creole in settler-colonial studies. It discusses Pidgin is the medium of affirming Native Hawaiian culture and thus central to how Native Hawaiians may resist the settler-colonial encroachment on land and life—primarily, through making nonsense of measuring Hawaiian blood, as if Hawaiian authenticity and culture could also be quantified. The chapter focuses on McDougall's collection because her Pidgin poem contains such a radical transformation of values. "Hypothetical" transforms both language and epistemology and articulating a moolelo with a radically shifted worldview.
